Adyashanti describes the experience of being a separate self as a contraction within consciousness that pervades body and mind. He suggests that ego is not a thing but a movement of grasping, and that recognising this contraction as it arises is one of the most direct entry points to non-duality.
Transcript
I wanted to start off with something something that's really I think very fundamental you know very basic but also very very fundamental if you you think of what um you know when we think of uh the the experience of being separate and all that that includes especially the the the challenging aspects of what it is to view separate. What what that really is if we really look at it very closely and kind of get down to the down to the root of it um of what separation really is where what what causes it, what's actually happening with inside of oneself. What it really is is that it's the experience of separation arises from a contraction within consciousness. Of course, that contraction also takes place throughout the whole the whole of body mind. Um the ego itself when we think when we talk of ego or egoic ego state of consciousness, what we're really talking about is is is a contraction. Ego is literally a contraction within consciousness. And if you just think back to, you know, when your ego gets the more painful it gets, however whatever version or how the however that manifests for you, if you really look at it, all the forms of egoic difficulty are various forms of contraction. they're they're a way that consciousness is kind of uh pulling away in a certain sense. And um I think this is really really important to get down to the real basics of of what's actually occurring because you know when we speak about ego or separation we can get it's so easy to get sort of lost in a in a sort of complicated understanding of what that is. But if we turn bring it back to its most simple direct form, it's a contraction with within consciousness. When consciousness contracts, it feels like well, it feels like one of one of the negative states. It feels like some form of suffering. It also tends to feel like and when you feel suffering when your consciousness contracts it you also feel more separate. You ever notice suffering and separateness pretty much always go together, right? And they're both contracted states of consciousness. Now the egoic identity is actually requires a kind of contraction within consciousness. This doesn't mean that you always feel the contraction in a very acute way. When you feel the contraction within consciousness that we call ego in an acute way, um that's that's what we call suffering, right? But when you're in the egoic state of consciousness, you're not always suffering in an acute way or you're not even always suffering period. At times you might actually feel feel pretty good for a while. But even when one's feeling good, there's still at a very fundamental level a degree of of contract contractedness, within consciousness, even within the body, within the mind. If you think of almost all the the uh positive states of being, love or joy or certainly bliss, um contentment, peace, all of these that I just mentioned, one of the hallmarks of them is they're they're all sort of a kind of a state of relaxation. The body is relaxed in these states. The mind tends to be relaxed. Consciousness itself is relaxed. When consciousness is in a relaxed state, it's basically a a positive state. It can go anywhere from simple contentment all the way to bliss and everything in between. These are all forms of uncontracted consciousness. So when you think of identity itself, the sort of separate identity as essentially a contraction within consciousness, to identify is to cause consciousness to contract. If you think of to identify is to reach out and grab hold, right? When you identify as an image, as a thought, as a memory, or any form of identification, it's almost as if you reach out and and grasp hold of something, right? And of course, when you grasp hold, it also feels simultaneously like something has grasped hold of you. And the reason that it feels like that is because what's actually happening in a deep level is simply a contraction within consciousness. That's what identification is. That's what attachment is, a contraction of consciousness. Right? Um clinging is a is a contracted state of consciousness. So all suffering involves a kind of contracted state of consciousness. All well-being has some element of experiencing a state of uncontracted consciousness. whether it's just a re relative state of well-being. Um where you're just relaxed and you're not troubled by, you know, what's going on in your life. Maybe you're on vacation or you're going for a walk or you're whatever you're doing and your mind and your body kind of relax a little bit and it feels and it feels better right? So this contracted state of consciousness however becomes habitual right as we form identity it becomes habitual. Of course the negative forms of of that identity defining ourselves or having somebody else define you in negative ways causes a kind of contraction. You can even feel feel the contraction in your body. But even the positive identifications, they often have an element of contraction because they're because they're ephemeral. You know, um even a positive sense of identity can be changed very very quickly when circumstances change. when all of a sudden things aren't going very well for you or you've been criticized or you know something like that happens then consciousness contracts. So in a in in a manner of speaking enlightenment is to experience consciousness in a completely uncontracted state. When it's completely uncontracted then we experience life as a whole.